When you can’t provide certainty, provide clarity, connection and rhythm
When direction from above is unclear, leaders can’t manufacture certainty. They can still give their team clarity, connection and rhythm. How one team stayed steady.
Barry Morris · Field Notes
Some seasons can’t be fixed quickly.
Direction stays unclear. Decisions get delayed. Senior leadership changes, then changes again. People wonder whether the work they’re doing still matters, or whether priorities are about to shift under them.
The instinct is to restore certainty as fast as possible. A new strategy. Firmer control. A decision that lets everyone move on. Sometimes that’s available. Often it isn’t.
In those seasons, leadership shifts from providing answers to providing steadiness.
A team in the fog
I led a team through a long stretch of uncertainty during changes in upper management. We had very little clarity about direction from above, and that was especially hard because our work wasn’t just completing tasks. It was making meaning: interpreting complexity, framing problems, and helping others understand what was happening.
When the bigger direction became unclear, second-guessing crept in. There was a particular kind of anxiety in the corridors. Was this work still aligned with what they wanted? Would priorities change again next month? How much weight could we put on any decision that might be reversed?
Waiting for perfect clarity wasn’t an option. The work kept coming.
What we did
We didn’t solve the uncertainty. We couldn’t. Instead we focused on three things we could control.
Clarity. We built our own internal framework and an interim protocol, so people had enough structure to act. We were careful not to dress it up as certainty from above. It was simply a workable way to orient ourselves while the wider environment stayed unsettled. People don’t need every answer. They need enough of a map to take the next step.
Connection. We protected the ordinary human moments that quietly disappear when everyone feels under pressure. We celebrated wins, even small ones. We made room for social events. Pressure isolates people, and isolated people fill the silence with worst-case stories.
Rhythm. We kept our weekly wind-downs, protected time to decompress, name what had happened and reconnect before the weekend. When everything else was moving, the rhythm didn’t.
What changed
The result was noticeable. The team became more settled and focused. The corridor anxiety eased. People stayed connected to each other and to the work.
Nothing about the external uncertainty had changed. What had changed was that the team had enough clarity and rhythm to live inside it.
That experience gave me a principle I keep coming back to: when you can’t provide certainty, you can still provide clarity, connection and rhythm.
Why this matters now
Many services in child protection, youth justice and residential care are living through exactly this kind of season. Reform, restructures, new contracts, changing priorities. Frontline leaders are often the last to know and the first to be asked what’s happening.
It’s tempting to think your job is to have the answers. Usually it isn’t. Your job is to stop the uncertainty above you from becoming chaos below you.
You can’t control the fog. You can make sure your team isn’t walking through it alone.
Leading through change? The 90-Day Implementation Lab helps frontline leaders build rhythms that hold under pressure.